Femicide Is A Political Act of Terror

Men enforce patriarchy through violence.

Just after she graduated from the Naval Academy, one of my high school friends, Kerry O’Neill was murdered by her ex-firancée. He also killed another student and then himself.

News accounts described the murder as a kind of tragedy with no perpetrator (“3 Friends Die As Dream Turns to Nightmare” “3 Promising Naval Officers Leave Tears and Disbelief”) or as a “lover’s quarrel.” Another friend—closer to Kerry than I was—said that he had suspected she was having trouble in her relationship but that he “thought she could handle herself.”

This mix of instant expiation, victim-blaming, and romanticization was common thirty years ago in cases of intimate partner violence. And it’s still common today. After former Virginia Lt Gov Justin Fairfax murdered his wife Cerina and then himself, Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis described the crime as “a fall from grace for a relatively high-profile family that seemingly had a lot of things going in their favor”. That suggests that the family as a whole was at fault, rather than condemning the one person in the family who murdered the other. The story has also been framed as one about mental health and depression among men in general or among Black men specifically.

There is, though, a feminist analysis of domestic violence and femicide which is rarely referenced in mainstream accounts of these murders. That feminist analysis argues that when men murder intimate partners, they are committing a political act, motivated, not by love or depression or internal stresses, but by a desire to publicly and violently assert their status as patriarchs in a patriarchal system. Femicide, in this framework, is an act of terrorism, meant to solidify dominance and keep women, as a class, in their place.

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Femicide is not an aberration

Accounts of intimate partner murders usually present them as aberrations, accidents, or incomprehensible tragedies, rooted in individual psychology and circumstances.

But there’s solid evidence that femicide is not an accident, but a pattern. Globally, the UN estimated that in 2020, a woman or girl was killed by someone in their family every 11 minutes. In the US, more than 55% of female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners or ex-intimate partners—which means that women who are murdered are more likely to have been killed by intimate partners than not.

Femicide is also part of a larger pattern of domestic violence and intimate partner violence which can include sexual violence, physical violence, and stalking. In the US, more than a third of women experience intimate partner violence during their lifetimes (as compared to 1 in 6 men.)

There are clear patterns which explain and predict when domestic violence escalates to murder. According to a 2002 report, one major danger sign is when the perpetrator has access to a gun. Another is when women become pregnant—and start to prioritize the coming child over their partners. And a third is when the victim has taken steps to escape the relationship. A yearly analysis of femicide deaths, found in 2022 that, “For over 14 years Femicide Census research has reported that leaving a relationship is one of the most dangerous times for a woman.”

Given that conclusion, it’s not a surprise the Cerina Fairfax was in the middle of divorce proceedings and that my friend Kerry had broken off her engagement when their abusers murdered them.

Femicide is entitlement

Again, feminists have a clear, compelling explanation for this dynamic. Francis Dupuis-Déri explains the outlines of this analysis in his short book on the murder of sociologist Hélène Rytmann by her husband, French Marxist philosopher Althusser. “A man decides to kill his spouse or ex-spouse rather than accept that she will leave him and emancipate herself from the relationship,” Dupuis-Déri writes. He quotes Julie Lefebvre and Suzanne Léveillée: “the most common reason given by men who have committed spousal homicide is the inability to accept marital separation.”

Here is Althusser’s explanation of why he murdered his wife. (Note that Althusser believes that this is as a sympathetic account which justifies his actions.)

I do not know what exactly I put Hélène through (I do know, however, that I was truly capable of the most terrible things), but she told me with a determination that terrified me that she could no longer live with me, that in her eyes I was a monster and that she wanted to leave me for good. She began quite openly to look for a flat, but did not find one immediately. She then made practical arrangements which I found unbearable; totally ignoring me, though I was still there, in our own flat. She got up before me and disappeared for the whole day. If she happened to stay at home, she refused to talk to me and even to come face to face with me … I was consumed with anguish. As you know, I always experienced intense anguish at being abandoned and especially by her, but being totally ignored, though I was still there, in our own home, was the most unbearable thing of all.

Rytmann acted as if she had her own life, as if she was no longer under Althusser’s control, as if she owed him nothing, as if she did not have to pay attention to him. Althusser found this intolerable. So he murdered her.

Femicide is not driven by love or depression or mental illness. It is driven by a sense of political entitlement. Feminist scholar Kate Manne argues in her book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women that entitlement—a belief that men deserve power over and fealty from women—is the core driving force of misogyny. “When a woman fails to give a man what he’s supposedly owed,” Manne writes, “she will often face punishment and reprisal.”

Patriarchy says that women in intimate relationships owe their partner’s domestic labor, sex, and deference. When a woman ceases to provide the emotional and physical labor to which men feel entitled, men will punish her—up to and including killing her.

More, that punishment will be seen as understandable and reasonable by a lot of people who buy into patriarchal institutions. Althusser’s friends rushed to his aid and got him declared mentally incompetent; academics and philosophers today still treat Rytmann’s murder—when they mention it at all—as an unfortunate, accidental blemish on an unquestionably great and just man.

That’s an extreme version, but you see the same impulse in the way that writers and cops and commenters blame femicide on mental illness, or love, or treat it like a natural disaster. Kate Manne calls this “himpathy”—the excessive empathy or sympathy directed at abusive men and away from their victims. Himpathy thrives because patriarchal entitlement says that men’s right to feel good about themselves is at least as important as women’s right to live.

Femicide is political

Men, and people who himpathize with men (which is a lot of people under patriarchy), even unto femicide, do so because they assent to, or agree with, a vision of the world in which men are entitled to power. A belief in a certain righteous distribution of power is not just an internal feeling; it is a politics. And femicide—which is committed to enforce power over an individual women and over women as a class—is a political act.

Jim Crow violence and lynchings in the South were directed against Black men who slept (often consensually) with white women; against Black people who had successful businesses; against Black people (like Ida B. Wells) who criticized white people in print; against Black people who insisted on sitting on the “wrong” bus seats. When white men horrifically murdered Emmett Till, they did not do so because they were mentally ill; they did not do so because they were motivated by understandable love for the woman who falsely accused him of whistling at her; they did not do it because they were swept along by natural tragic forces. They murdered him because they believed they were entitled to do so, because they thought he had personally insulted them by not behaving with sufficient deference, and because they wanted to keep other Black people in their place.

Similarly, when men commit femicide, they are motivated by their sense that they have been insulted as men, because they want to punish the woman for not behaving with sufficient deference, and because they want to warn other women to stay in their place. When men kill themselves following a femicide, they are perhaps attempting to escape accountability, but they are also deliberately laying down their lives for a cause they believe in—male supremacy. Femicides are not just directed at a single woman; they are part of systemic violence directed at women as a class, and they are meant as a warning. Do not defy your partner, do not leave an abusive relationship, do not withdraw your affection without permission, or we will do this to you.

Women hear this message and understand it. They stay in abusive relationships because they fear that they or their children will be killed if they don’t. They make jokes about how they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear than with a man. They leave jobs when they are sexually harassed because they understand that confronting men rarely leads to justice and often leads to escalating violence and reprisals.

Men, though, and mainstream media, and patriarchal institutions, pretend that they do not know what femicide is, or how it is used. They deflect and treat it as an individual blip or mistake—much as racist terror still today is often treated as a personal failure or an aberration, rather than the deliberate use of violence to advance a political program of white supremacy.

The denial of the misogynist politics of femicide is part of those misogynist politics, since that denial allows people to blandly distance themselves from violence without examining the ideologies that enable and demand that violence. To erase the politics of femicide is to sidestep discussions of how guns are seen as an essential expression of masculinity. It enables a discourse in which violence against women inevitably leads to calls for more resources for men rather than to a demand for more support for women.

Kerry O’Neill wasn’t killed in a “lover’s quarrel”; Cerina Fairfax wasn’t killed by her husband’s mental illness. They were both murdered by men enforcing patriarchy—a violent ideology of hate. As long as that ideology is allowed to fester, more women will die. Defeating patriarchy isn’t easy. But the first step is naming it.